– don’t mess with Gaia says Lovelock

Geoengineering — trying to change the Earth’s climate on a global scale by doing things like seeding the upper atmosphere with reflective particles — is getting attention from serious scientists.

But not so fast, says James Lovelock, originator of the hugely influential ‘Gaia Hypothesis.‘  In an article in today’s Guardian, Lovelock says:

our ignorance of the Earth system is great; we know little more than an early 19th-century physician knew about the body. Geoengineering is like trying to cure pneumonia by immersing the patient in a bath of icy water; the fever would be cured but not the disease.

Better to leave the Earth to cleanse itself, says Lovelock, since our cure may be worse even than the ailment it currently suffers, both for the Earth and for us.

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– frugality is back in fashion

It used to be that frugal cheapskates like us were the odd ones out.   Now we’re trendy.  And we have a historian.

Could we actually be on the cusp of a new era of living sustainably and within our means?  Let’s hope.

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– how much land would solar power generation take up?

We’ve voiced our concern here before that solar power generating plants still have an environmental footprint.

But this nifty graphic, by David McCandless of Information is Beautiful, places that worry within an impressively positive context.

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– more on washing lines!

Other pressing duties have kept us from updating this site anything like as often as we’d have liked, but while we’ve been somewhat dormant it’s been interesting to see what has still brought people here.  Perhaps the number one subject on the site that has drawn in visitors over the past year is the issue of washing lines.

Laundry liberation, it seems, is a big deal for a lot of people.

Well, here’s another article on the same theme.

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